Cuba

Sister Mary Beatrice, a member of the Oblate Sisters of Providence, died Saturday of cardiac arrest at her order's mother house in Catonsville. She was 83. Born Matilde Hernandez in Cardenas, Cuba, she entered her Roman Catholic religious order Sept. 3, 1939. She professed her vows at St. Frances Convent on East Chase Street in 1942. From 1948 to 1961, she worked in schools in Cuba.. She then moved to Baltimore and became the portress - the sister assigned to monitor the front door - at St. Frances Academy, her order's school.

Alan Gross, the Maryland man who is serving 15 years in a Cuban prison after taking communications equipment into the communist nation, is asking authorities there to let him return to the United States to visit his ailing mother before she dies. Gross, who grew up in the Baltimore area and lived in Potomac, told CNN that he and his lawyer had written to the Cuban government "on more than one occasion" to request permission to see Evelyn Gross. "I have a 90-year-old mother who has inoperable lung cancer.

Fidel Castro's revolution has now taken Cuba to the point where oxen are replacing tractors and bicycles rather than automobiles will soon be the chief means of transport. Ironically, it is not the United States that is threatening to bring down the Castro regime -- perhaps before the end of 1991. It is the Soviet Union.Long ago, Cuba learned to live without U.S. trade and economic aid. But can it live without the $5-billion annual subsidy from Moscow that accounts for 20 percent of its entire gross national product?

Cuban accusations against American Alan Gross and recent Egyptian allegations against four Americans who were promoting democracy on Egyptian soil have some eerie similarities. Alan Gross, who has been confined in Cuba since 2009, and the four Americans in Egypt who recently had bail posted for them by the Government of Qatar, have been using United States taxpayers' money to promote openness and democracy in two countries that have no interest in the United States interfering in their internal affairs.

Cuba was acting within its sovereign right in executing Eduardo Diaz Betancourt on Monday. It was also acting in panic.The recent Cuban defector had been caught with two American-based compatriots running arms from a dinghy onto Cuba's north coast. Many regimes would do what Fidel Castro's did. It was reacting not from fear of the Cuban emigre community in Florida, which sponsors these forlorn incursions, but rather from paranoid terror of the impoverished and disillusioned population in Cuba.

From little baseball games do mighty cultural exchanges grow.Charm City's newfound buddy-buddy relationship with Fidel Castro's Cuba continues next week, as five representatives from Baltimore arts organizations leave Sunday for Havana to share things cultural with their Caribbean counterparts. The group will be attending the First International Culture and Development Congress, being held under the auspices of UNESCO and UNICEF.Those traveling to Cuba are Steven Baxter, dean of the Peabody Conservatory; Dennis Fiori, director of the Maryland Historical Society; Leslie King-Hammond, dean of graduate studies at the Maryland Institute, College of Art; Ted Rouse, chairman of the board of the American Visionary Arts Museum; and Steve Ziger, chairman of the board of the Contemporary Museum.

HAVANA -- As the United States goes through another Cuban crisis, I am in Cuba teaching geriatric medicine for the Ministry of Health and at an international medical conference with leading doctors from Europe and South America.Havana has greatly changed in the last two years. With market reforms, enterprising Cubans have opened many restaurants, coffee shops, repair shops and car dealerships. Pharmacy shelves are stocked.The endearing 1950s Chevies are still plentiful, but many newer cars, motorcycles and bicycles fight them for parking spaces.

Miami -- YOU SCOFF at the idea that the shadowy intrigues of historic Byzantium could be brought back to life today, right off the shores of our very own sunny Florida? That today Caribbean "emperors" are manipulating not in the name of God, but of the "free market"?I suggest very strongly then that you look, this watershed second week of October, at Fidel Castro's Cuba.In Havana, GeorgieAnneGeyeras Castro faced the Fourth Communist Party Congress yesterday, he was plotting for his very life as never before in his 32 years in power.

TWELVE-year-old Oscarito is one of about 5,000 children who ended up at the U.S. Naval Base in Guantanamo Bay during the August exodus of Cubans on rafts seeking freedom. Thirty thousand Cubans now are at Guantanamo, living in tents on part of the very island they intended to flee.Oscarito and his father, Oscar Govantes, no longer live at the base, though. They arrived in Miami last Wednesday after the child became temporarily paralyzed and was sent to Washington for treatment.The boy can walk again, and, for humanitarian reasons, the U.S. government has allowed Oscarito and his father to live with relatives in Miami.

Washington. THE DEATH of Communism is less an event than a process -- a process now painfully under way in Cuba. The Marxist regime is still in power, but the world revolution from which it drew energy and sustenance has died.Fidel Castro is girding his countrymen's loins for the ''special period'' of hardship when the revolution will be tested as never before. The economic crisis of which Mr. Castro warned last January is nearly upon them. The Socialist trading system of barter and subsidies has collapsed with the transformation of Eastern Europe.

Plans to begin weekly flights to Cuba from Baltimore have been pushed back to October because of lack of demand, the head of the travel company offering the service said Tuesday. The flights were to begin next month. William Hauf, president of Tampa, Fla.-based Island Travel & Tours Ltd., said his company delayed the start of the service to Havana from Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport to allow more time to market the flights to eligible groups, such as university and religious organizations.

- Judy Gross stood outside Cuba's diplomatic mission to the United States, microphone in hand, and described her family's Thanksgiving. "There was once again an empty seat for Alan," she told sign-wielding supporters Monday in front of the Cuban Interests Section in Washington. "That huge void, the pain, and the anguish are worse this year, as no one thought that we would be celebrating another holiday without Alan. " "Free Alan Gross now!" supporter Les Ulanow shouted. The demonstration reflected a new approach in the long campaign to win the release of the Maryland man, who was sentenced in March to 15 years in a Cuban prison for crimes against the state.

It was undoubtedly exciting news: Baltimore would become one of the few spots in the U.S. offering flights to Cuba, a Communist nation largely off-limits to American travelers. But one critical item had been overlooked: the paperwork. The Florida travel company that plans direct flights from Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport to Havana is being scrutinized by federal officials for promoting its plans before receiving the necessary approval for charter flights.

Our organization was pleased to read about plans to begin charter flights from BWI to Cuba in March ("Hola, Cuba! Flights from BWI to Cuba to start next year," Nov. 4). It's about time. The ban on U.S. citizens traveling to Cuba has been in place for over 50 years. It is part of the economic embargo the U.S. instituted to try to starve Cuba into complying with our vision of what Cuba's form of government should be. If it was up to people like the restaurant owner from Towson quoted in the article, that policy would stay in place another 50 years.

I was elated to read your article about the new charter flights to Cuba ("BWI flights to Cuba to start in March," Nov. 5). I left Cuba in 1997 which I was 9, which officially makes me a "Castro's daughter" - the term Cuban-Americans use to describe those who left long after the revolution. That being said, I don't share the views of those who lament any thawing of relations between the United States and Cuba. For me, the Cold War is over, the Eastern bloc and the Soviets are gone, and now it's time to focus on our little island and its wonderful people who have been isolated much too long.

A Tampa-based company plans to begin offering flights next spring from BWI-Marshall Airport to Cuba, where travel has been restricted since 1961, shortly after Fidel Castro took power and nationalized U.S.-owned businesses. But visitors shouldn't count on buying tickets solely to explore the island's beaches. "You cannot go to Cuba for what they call tourism," said William Hauf, president of Island Travel & Tours Ltd., which announced plans for the flights Friday. The Island Travel trips are considered charters, though they will operate at fixed times on Wednesdays much like scheduled airline flights.

Want to know the cruelest action the United States could take against the Cuban rafters? Withdraw the two-dozen Navy and Coast Guard ships on patrol in the Florida Straits and let the sharks have at them! That would slow the exodus, and quick. According to some reports, such an approach actually was broached at the White House last week before President Clinton decided on the far more humane course of taking thousands of asylum-seekers to Guantanamo for safe-keeping as the Cuban crisis moves in unpredictable ways.

Cuba de Ayer is the wonderful creation of Jessica Rodriguez, who thought so highly of her mother-in-law's home-style Cuban cooking that she decided to open a restaurant. Her mother-in-law, Mayra Lopez, from Camaguey in Cuba, was, I assume, first flattered and later surprised when this actually happened. Cuba de Ayer graciously serves moderately priced, wholesome, and very tasty food in cheerfully attractive and well-managed surroundings. It's the kind of suburban restaurant that is packed with merry regulars on a Sunday night, the kind of place that people discover by word of mouth and stay loyal to for years.

If you have the hankering for a good cigar, you will be able to jump on a charter flight from BWI to Cuba beginning in March and buy a box there. Island Travel & Tours Ltd.  will be operating the weekly service that departs mid-afternoons starting March 21. William Hauf, president of Island Travel, said in a statement:  “These flights will greatly expand opportunities for increased engagement between the two countries and facilitate legal travel to Cuba for business leaders, government officials, diplomats, academics, cultural groups, agricultural interests, performing arts groups, and Cuban-Americans wishing to reconnect with their families and their country.” Baltimore is entering an elite travel niche.

Please pass on to letter writer Umar Farooq ("Occupy Baltimore: There's a reason The Sun can't grasp what our movement is about," Oct. 8) that most of us prefer the optimism and opportunity of capitalism to the pessimism and depression of socialism. He should look at Cuba as an example of socialism - and then ask himself why the U.S. gets so many immigrants from that country, while almost no one from here wants to live there. Lyle Rescott, Marriottsville